Will Windows Have To Be Activated In Order To Upgrade To Windows 7?
Say, I have a windows vista install disk, and I install it, but don’t have the product key, and therefor can’t activate it, will I be able to use the windows 7 upgrade disc and install windows 7, or will I have to have an activated windows vista first?
Supposedly during an installation with the Windows 7 upgrade disk you’ll be able to simply insert the Vista disk at some point and you’ll be able to proceed.
There will be people needing to do fresh installs at times, and that’s supposedly the way they work it.
The (genuine) Vista disk by itself should be enough. You shouldn’t need to install or activate it.
If you are wanting to use vista just to burn a copy of the Windows 7 RC then no, you don’t have to activate as even when you do an upgrade it Windows 7 will ask for it’s product key, which you should have received when you signed into microsoft to receive the key. Microsoft is giving away unlimited keys until the end of July. Unlike the Beta testing where they tried to limite it to 2.5 million, they learned from that mistake. Also Windows 7 RC will be supported until June 2010, according to I guess a few sources. I read it in CPU magazine. So if you download it now you can potentially use it for pretty much a year. I just installed Windows 7 to my Gateway m6827, which came with vista, 7 runs much smoother then vista ever did. I’m gettin ready to install 7 to my gateway fx p7805u now. You just may have some compatibility issues with certain programs. But once the main release happens you shouldn’t, the RC is pretty much the full version but still needs to be fine tuned. Which Microsoft is using us to help to do this, by using error reporting much like xp and vista does. But i’ve run accross no problems here and would reccomend getting a copy while you still can. Best to follow the min requirments though, which if you already running vista you should be fine.